Conference Summary

Abstract

I also had the honor of summarizing last year’s conference on “Preventing Bank Crises,” which the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago co-sponsored with the World Bank and the proceedings of which were just published (Caprio et al., 1998). I found that conference considerably easier to summarize. There was far less disagreement than at this year’s conference. Last year’s conference took place just before the outbreak of the Korean and South East Asian crises and focused primarily on the problems in Latin America in 1994-1995 and in the transition economies of Eastern Europe and the former USSR. Even before the current crises, the IMF had reported banking crises in some 130 of its 180-plus member countries. There was almost a universal agreement among the participants at last year’s conference on the causes and solutions of these banking crises.